


stuck in the middle with you

by parcequelle



Category: Major Crimes (TV), The Closer
Genre: Alternate Universe, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2019-07-07 17:40:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15913101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parcequelle/pseuds/parcequelle
Summary: ‘Well,’ Sharon said, scrubbing a hand down her face, ‘I’m not exactly alone. Brenda’s here.’ (Grace and Frankie AU)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This AU borrows the basic premise of Grace and Frankie - that Brenda and Sharon's husbands leave them for each other after years of cheating - but will branch out from canon after that. You might recognise bits and pieces from the show, if you've seen it, but you don't need to know it to understand this.

Three days and sixteen hours had passed since it happened. Three days and sixteen hours since she strode into a restaurant, expecting to come out happily abuzz with retirement-celebratory champagne, and instead found herself being dumped over mediocre chicken. It wasn’t even Andy who’d said it, in the end; it was Fritz. But that was just fitting, wasn’t it? Fritz had always had that air about him, one that hinted at a streak of cruelty masked in patience and understanding and phrases that meant _I know what’s best for you so you should listen_. Sharon had never held anything but a kind of irritated, low-level contempt for his Southern Belle transplant wife, but she hadn’t liked the way he treated her, either. Sharon had bristled at the patronising way he’d tried to mould the woman into the cookie-cutter shape of a society wife, when even Sharon could see it would never happen. Brenda had all the people skills of an aggressive malignant tumour and a voice that made Sharon’s teeth hurt, but she’d give the woman this much: she was one of a kind.

After three days and _thirteen_ hours of involuntarily sharing space in their husbands’ beach house, though, Sharon was beginning to wonder if “one of a kind” was a compliment.

‘Sharon!’ Brenda called from the kitchen, and Sharon winced. That _voice_. ‘Sharon, are you still in there?’

‘No, I’m in the Maldives!’ Sharon shouted back, but for reasons she couldn’t fathom, pushed herself off the sofa and walked next door, hands on her hips. ‘What’s wrong now?’

Brenda looked up at her from where she’d had her head inside the icebox – red-rimmed eyes watery, lip quivering – and mumbled, ‘Do we have any more ice-cream?’

Sharon couldn’t stop herself from glancing down the lean line of Brenda’s hips and then back up again. Where on God’s green Earth did she put it all? ‘You ate it all? Already?’

Brenda actually pouted. Like a five-year-old. ‘I’m grievin’,’ she said defensively, as though Sharon hadn’t been able to hear her blubbering through the walls every night since she’d got here. ‘I’m pretty sure eatin’ your own weight in artificially-sweetened dairy products is part of the healin’ process.’

She dropped her Gs more often when she was upset, Sharon had noticed; upset or tired or angry. Those were the three most prominent emotions Sharon had seen from her, each of them marginally less annoying than the phase of whiny complaining that happened, like clockwork, at 5pm when Brenda’s blood sugar dropped. ‘Of course,’ Sharon said now, sarcastic. ‘I’m sure the diabetic coma you induce with that garbage will provide a nice distraction from your predicament.’

‘What is wrong with you, Sharon?’ Brenda snapped, slamming the icebox door shut with such suddenness and volume that Sharon jumped. Brenda looked pleased to have gotten a reaction, and Sharon rolled her eyes. ‘Are you completely incapable of feeling?’

Tight-lipped, Sharon ignored her in favour of storming out of the room and turning on the TV. She’d discovered, since arriving here and suddenly having nothing to do with her days, that they were rerunning old episodes of _Remington Steel_ every afternoon. She’d loved Pierce Brosnan, when she was young.

She had no intention of demonstrating her emotional vulnerabilities to Brenda Leigh Johnson, no matter how much she wheedled. The woman needed to learn that adults didn’t cry at the drop of a hat, even if they felt like it; that stoicism and pride and self-control were worth something. Sharon held regular dialogues between herself and an imaginary Brenda, usually at night, as she lay awake, listening to Brenda tossing and turning in the room across the hall. In these dialogues, she outlined to Brenda in a neat, orderly fashion the reasons why her behaviour was juvenile, as well as the reasons why Sharon’s own outward unflappability was not indicative of a lack of feeling. Of course she felt something – what did Brenda think? That her husband of thirteen years could up and leave her, announce that he’d been having an affair with his smarmy, condescending business partner for half the time they’d been married, and that she wouldn’t care? That she could just brush it off?

She huffed and turned off Remington Steel. His posturing was annoying her. She didn’t want to look at any men, real or fictional. Bored and frustrated and tired, her customary state since The Announcement, she stalked upstairs to take a nap. If Brenda wanted more ice-cream, she could damn well go and buy it herself.

*

The next morning, Sharon woke up bleary, in the middle of a REM cycle, to the sound of her cell phone buzzing across the nightstand. She glared at it, ready to blast Andy halfway to New York if he’d dared to call her – and at the ungodly hour of 8am – but sat up and answered when she saw that it was her daughter.

‘Hi, Em,’ she said. She coughed once; her throat was scratchy.

‘Mom,’ Emily said. ‘Sorry, did I wake you?’ She sounded surprised, but Sharon supposed that was to be expected. She’d been getting up at 5am for forty years, after all.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but it’s fine. How are you?’

‘I’m fine, I just wanted to ask how _you_ were. Rusty said—’

Sharon sighed. ‘Rusty worries. I’m doing all right, honey, really. As well as can be expected.’ She paused, Emily’s unconvinced silence speaking volumes. ‘I have good days and bad days,’ she finally admitted. ‘You know how it is. I remember how distraught you were when you broke up with Yee.’

‘Yeah, but… Mom, I was, like, fifteen when Yee and I dated. For _four months_. That’s not even… that’s not even in the same universe as this.’

‘Precisely,’ Sharon said. ‘You were fifteen and I am an adult. I have a better handle on my emotions.’

Another silence, and then Emily sighed. ‘If you say so. What are you doing, anyway? To keep yourself busy?’

‘Oh, you know,’ Sharon said vaguely. She cast a glance around the room, searching for a preoccupation to distract her suspicious, too-clever daughter, and finally landing on a hideous crocheted cushion. Brenda’s doing, surely. ‘Bit of knitting.’

‘Did you say _knitting_?’

‘I decided to take it up again. You wouldn’t believe the number of hobbies one has to give up for the sake of small children and a clean house.’

‘We had a cleaning lady!’

‘Oh, for goodness sake, Emily, what do you want me to say? That I’m devastated and humiliated? Of course I am. That I don’t know what to do with myself? Well, I don’t. There. Are you happy?’

‘Of course not,’ Emily said, after a tense moment. ‘Of course not, Mom. I’m sorry. I just worry about you, too. You’ve always been so active and busy and I just... I can’t stand the thought of you festering away out there all alone.’

‘Well,’ Sharon said, scrubbing a hand down her face – would she regret this? Probably. ‘I’m not exactly alone, Em. Brenda’s here.’

‘No, _still_?’

‘She doesn’t exactly have anywhere else to go,’ Sharon said. ‘Her parents are dead, her family’s on the other side of the country. That niece of hers is out here but can’t put her up, and I…’ The sentence died and she did nothing to revive it.

‘You’ve got to kick her out, Mom, seriously,’ Emily said. ‘Isn’t she driving you crazy?’

As if to punctuate it, just then Sharon heard the sound of something crashing to the ground in the living room, followed by Brenda’s voice saying, ‘Oh, shoot.’

Sharon sighed and said, ‘Her presence is… somewhat trying, yes.’

‘Get rid of her. Tell her to go stake her rightful claim on their house or some shit.’

‘Language,’ Sharon said absently, mostly out of habit. She could practically feel Emily rolling her eyes in response.

‘Whatever. Just… tell her to leave. In the nicest way possible. You deserve your space.’

‘Weren’t you worried about me festering away all alone half a minute ago?’

‘That was before I realised the alternative was you having to put up with Brenda. Listen, Mom, I’ve gotta go – I need to get to rehearsal. Just wanted to check in.’

‘Of course,’ Sharon said. She suppressed the urge to sigh; she was used to this. ‘Thanks for calling.’

‘I’ll keep in touch,’ Emily promised, and then, ‘get rid of her! Bye.’

‘Bye,’ Sharon said, but Emily was already gone, and she was just speaking into the void.

*

When she finally went downstairs in search of coffee, Sharon was surprised to find Brenda, usually late to bed and late to rise, already awake and sitting at the breakfast table. She was drinking a mug of what looked like milky dishwater and eating a poptart, but still, progress was progress; Sharon was fairly certain this was the first day Brenda had eaten breakfast at all since they’d got here.

‘Mornin’,’ Brenda said around a mouthful of sugary death carbs, not looking up from the newspaper.

‘Good morning,’ Sharon said, and headed for the coffee pot. It was a fancy French thing that Andy had insisted on buying even though he was just as content to drink instant, and she realised now that that purchase had probably been more for Fritz’s sake – Fritz, who was an original east coast caffeine snob – than her own. Sharon hated Andy, then, with a sudden viciousness that surprised her – hated both of them, hated them more than she hated novels that utilised love triangles as a plot device, hated them more than Brenda’s floral skirts.

She turned away from the filter and decided to make tea instead. A matter of principle.

She watched Brenda surreptitiously as she waited for the kettle to boil. She wasn’t dressed, at least not like someone over the age of six; she was braless in overlarge pink pyjamas dotted with little dancing… meringues, perhaps? Marshmallows? And her hair was still in the messy double braids she’d worn to bed. On her feet were a pair of fuzzy pink slippers and purple polka dot socks, into which she had tucked the cuffs of her pyjama pants. She was completely lacking in self-consciousness, Sharon noticed with a start. She wore what she wanted and did what she wanted and didn’t care that she looked like an overgrown toddler. It was almost impressive.

Sharon normally would have gone to have breakfast out on the patio alone, but this morning, she decided it couldn’t hurt to join Brenda at the table. If she wanted to get her to leave, after all, then she was going to have to talk to her, find a way to casually suggest it. Maybe plant the idea of returning to their old neighbourhood, remind her of everything she’d left behind – clothes and shoes, makeup and books. Her stash of red wine, perhaps; Sharon had noticed she liked a drink or two in the evenings, not that she could blame her. She’d have been lying if she’d said that she wasn’t enjoying the opportunity to drink as much as she wanted, whenever she wanted, without having to worry about making things difficult for Andy. She’d always respected his affliction, always been careful not to flaunt it when she indulged in a glass of wine or port after a long, stressful day, but that also meant she’d always been on guard.

She took her Earl Grey and her cereal and smiled at Brenda, a little forced, as she sat down opposite her at the large round table. ‘How did you sleep?’ she asked, taking a sip of tea. God, but it was revolting. Even her principles weren’t worth this.

Brenda looked at her suspiciously. Fair enough, Sharon supposed; it wasn’t as though she’d been making a great effort at small talk before now. ‘No worse than usual,’ she finally said. She swallowed the last of the poptart and licked the sugar off her fingers. Sharon tried not to gag. ‘You?’

‘Same,’ Sharon said. ‘The third glass of wine helped.’

Brenda snorted. ‘I know the feeling. Kinda nice not to have to worry about that, ain’t it? Leavin’ half-empty bottles of wine around?’

‘Indeed,’ Sharon admitted. _I was just thinking the same thing,_ she could have said, but didn’t. ‘So,’ she said, with an attempt at joviality, ‘what do you have planned for today?’

‘Dunno,’ Brenda said. She reached out and hooked her fingers around the handle of her mug, spinning it around on the wooden surface. The sound grated, but Sharon grit her teeth and said nothing. ‘Watch Dr Phil. Maybe he’ll talk to some husbands who’ve been lyin’ and cheatin’ on their wives since the third year of their ten-year…’ Brenda’s eyes welled again, large and pretty and sad, and Sharon felt her irritation bleed away into the reluctant compassion she had only ever felt for this woman.

Silence sat between them for a moment before Sharon pushed her nearly-full tea cup away from her and said, ‘Have you thought about going back to the duplex?’

Brenda stared at her. ‘Why?’

‘You must miss it.’ When that didn’t spark a response, she tried, ‘And surely there are things you need… things you left behind?’

Brenda made a noise too cynical to be a laugh, and her eyes were cloudy. ‘Real subtle, Sharon, thanks. Look, I ain’t stupid, whatever you think of me. I know you don’t want me here. I know you just wanna kick me outta here the first chance you get. Well, it ain’t fair!’ She ripped her dark-rimmed glasses off her nose and threw them onto the abandoned newspaper. ‘This house is part mine, too, and I’m in exactly the same position you are. I lost everythin’ and my family ain’t even close by, ‘cept for Charlie.’ 

Sharon didn’t generally compete in the misery Olympics, but she’d give Brenda that one: Emily might be in New York, but Ricky had settled in San Francisco, and Rusty was still in L.A. Even San Francisco was easier than a flight and a shift in time zones. And Sharon had never been close to her own parents. Losing them hadn’t devastated her the way it had Brenda. She felt a twinge of guilt at her selfishness, at having been caught out in it. ‘You’re right,’ she said, and Brenda looked up in surprise, like she’d expected Sharon to argue. ‘I suppose I haven’t been as… generous as I could have been. I’m not going to kick you out.’ She wouldn’t apologise – couldn’t – but it didn’t seem to matter. Brenda looked appeased. ‘I’ve asked Andy for this house,’ she said suddenly. ‘And if I have to, I’m going to fight him for it. When I think about how they pitched this place to us as this amazing investment, made it sound like some opportunity we just couldn’t pass up, and then all the time they were…’

Brenda gaped at her in horror. ‘Sharon!’ she exclaimed.

‘What?’

‘How could… I… I didn’t never think of that!’

Sharon winced. ‘Oh.’

‘You mean they…’ Brenda pushed her chair out from the table, scraping it along the linoleum, and bounded up to start pacing the length of the kitchen. ‘They deceived us into agreein’ to buy this place and then… and then pretended to be goin’ to AA meetings and business trips and all the while came out here to… fuck.’

Sharon’s eyes widened in alarm. In fifteen years, she had never heard Brenda Leigh Johnson swear. Not once. She’d never even heard her say “damn”. Even now, she wasn’t sure if she had meant it as an expletive or as a euphemism for sex. It seemed appropriate that the one time Brenda cursed, she would do so homographically. Sharon swallowed down the violent, bewildering urge to laugh. ‘God,’ she said, and then did laugh. ‘God, how stupid were we not to see it?’

Brenda stopped in the middle of the kitchen floor, absurd in pink pyjamas and a kindergartner’s hairstyle, and guffawed. ‘We’re morons. Can you believe I was a cop once upon a time? No wonder they sidelined me.’

‘Can you believe _I_ spent twenty years as the senior editor of an international publishing house? I probably would have rejected a novel with this premise, you know. Too contrived.’

Brenda snorted and returned to the table, plonked herself back into a different chair. There was just one place separating them, now, instead of a whole expanse of wood. ‘Maybe you should write it yourself,’ Brenda said. ‘I bet people would eat it up.’

‘The tale of two middle-aged women whose husbands left them for each other? Hardly.’ She shook her head. ‘Old people don’t sell, especially old women. I can promise you that.’

‘Oh, shut it,’ Brenda huffed. ‘You always look perfect, which, quite frankly, I find annoyin’. It ain’t normal to look that good at sixty.’

Sharon smirked. ‘Sixty-one.’

Brenda glared at her. ‘So what are you sayin’?’ she asked, picking up the old thread of conversation as though they’d never dropped it. ‘You want me to go over to my – to Fritz’s – house and bring my stuff back here?’

‘Why shouldn’t you? If you aren’t living there, you should at least have your things.’ She gestured at Brenda’s meringue/marshmallow pyjamas. ‘As lovely as they are, you can’t keep wearing those all day.’

‘I should do, just to embarrass Fritz.’

‘I think you’d only be embarrassing yourself,’ Sharon said gently. ‘Don’t give him that power.’

Brenda swallowed and swallowed again, visibly pushing back tears, and then nodded. ‘If I get dressed, will you take me there, Sharon? To the house?’

Sharon wanted to say no. She wanted to tell Brenda that it wasn’t her place to get involved, that this was something Brenda should do on her own and anyway, she had her own car, why couldn’t she drive it? But Brenda looked so doleful, and so plaintive, and Brenda had never asked her for anything before. And Sharon really, really wanted her to get dressed. So she nodded. ‘Have a shower, too,’ she said. ‘And don’t use my base, it won’t match your skin.’

*

They went to the duplex, and they got Brenda’s stuff. Feeling uncomfortable and out of place, Sharon trailed Brenda around the cold, dreary house, watching her toss things haphazardly into a faded Atlanta PD duffel that was probably the same age as Rusty. From the bedroom, she took clothes, two books, a spare pair of glasses. From the bathroom, makeup and moisturiser. (Sharon was quietly relieved; Brenda had been using hers since the evening of The Announcement, and it was unsettling that she smelt the same as Sharon’s pillow.) In the living room, Brenda gathered up another few books and then paused at the mantelpiece, fingers outstretched and quivering. A framed photo of her parents, happy and proud in ugly Christmas sweaters, stood beside a photo of the three of them – Brenda between them, 80s hair wild, graduation cap and gown crisp black – and beside that, a frame that was lying face-down. ‘I can’t…’ Brenda started. Her voice was raw, and she coughed. ‘I…’

Sharon moved closer and gently picked up the photo of Brenda’s parents. She had met them once; had thought, at the time, that they were kinder and far more genuine than their daughter. ‘This one?’ Sharon asked. ‘Do you want to keep it?’

Brenda nodded, and Sharon placed it carefully into the bag, but Brenda’s attention was focused on the third frame, the one that was lying down. ‘How could he do that?’

‘How could he…?’ she started, but then stopped. Narrowed her eyes. Moved to the frame and picked it up and almost gasped when she saw the wedding picture – ten years earlier, Brenda stunning and happy and simply and sweetly dressed. Until a week ago, she had hardly looked a day older. Sharon’s heart skipped a beat and then started to race, but out of fury. ‘Because he’s a cold-hearted, shameless bastard, that’s how.’ Impulsively, Sharon turned the frame over, tugged out the pins, and handed the photo over. ‘Take it with you,’ she said.

Brenda blanched. ‘Are you crazy? Why in the heck would I—’

‘Take it,’ Sharon said. She felt strangely exhilarated, anger thrumming through her like energy. ‘Take it with you and rip it up into little pieces. Set it on fire. Stick it on a dartboard. Just don’t let him get away with this… this insult.’

Brenda peered at her, finally inquisitive about something other than ice-cream. ‘You’re real bossy, you know that?’

‘Oh, I know,’ Sharon said. ‘Come on, let’s raid his goddamn fridge.’

They did raid his fridge, and they made sure to leave him a half-empty bottle of pineapple juice (which he didn’t like) and a can of chilli tuna (which he could eat, but wouldn’t want to). Brenda took her four remaining bottles of Merlot, carefully hidden at the back of the pantry, and she and Sharon carried the now-heavy duffle between them as they fled. She did not leave a note. But the adrenaline of the heist left them as soon as they reached the car, and Sharon looked over at Brenda in the passenger seat. She looked tiny and miserable, her knees drawn tight together, her mouth a hard line, her eyes welling. Sharon reached into the back seat to hand her a box of tissues and Brenda took it, grabbed a handful, then dropped the box into her lap.

‘Are you sorry to leave it?’ Sharon asked her. ‘The house, I mean?’

Brenda looked out the window, quiet for a long, thoughtful moment. Then she said, ‘No.’ She turned back to Sharon, a hint of steel in her eyes Sharon hadn’t seen in four days, and added, ‘How ‘bout we head to your place too, while we’re at it?’

‘While we’re at it,’ Sharon said. It’s not like he’d be at home. He wasn’t retired. ‘Why not?’

*

She’d thought she was ready, but she wasn’t. Separation and divorce could be like death, people said; could shake up the lives of the people close to it and leave them trapped in a whirlpool of grief. It was the decent thing to do, really, wasn’t it – to grieve the loss of a marriage, as though that marriage had been a third person in the room, a third person sitting between two other people, connecting them, two people who were otherwise apart.

Sharon was grieving. She was grieving the loss of her husband as her partner and her friend; she was grieving the loss of her trust in him, and the tarnishing of every good memory that followed that loss of trust. She found herself furious and relieved by turns – furious that he’d lied, that he’d been such a coward, that he’d humiliated her, that he was the reason she’d be twice-divorced to cheating men at sixty (sixty-one); relieved that it hadn’t gone on any longer, that she wouldn’t have to sleep beside a liar for one more night and that at least this time, there were no children involved. She was relieved that he had been kind to her even as he cheated on her; that he had always been kinder than Fritz, and never violent, never cruel in word. They’d had a few good years, she thought, and those she would miss, even if she couldn’t treasure them.

But Andy wasn’t grieving. No, Andy – her kind, gentle husband, who always guided her through doors with his hand at the small of her back, who always made her chicken soup when she was down with a cold – was celebrating. They saw it as soon as they walked in. Two feet and then there it was: the dining table, adorned with the remnants of Andy’s signature special breakfast, the one he’d made for Emily’s graduation and their tenth anniversary: two sets of plates and bowls and cutlery, fluffy blueberry pancakes and mimosas and French toast, a bottle of syrup holding court in the middle of it all.

Andy wasn’t supposed to eat syrup, Sharon thought faintly. He was already high risk for diabetes.

‘Yoohoo, Sharon!’

It was the piercing, waspish sound of it that snapped Sharon out of her daze, and Brenda was right in front of her, waving her hand. ‘What!’ she barked.

Brenda scowled. ‘We didn’t come here to stare at congealin’ food, did we? Hop to it and get your stuff. I hate this house.’

Sharon had always loved this house, had loved it as the place she and Andy had shared life, and the place Rusty had grown stable and eventually happy, but now she said, ‘So do I,’ and found it was true.

She followed Brenda upstairs and pulled out a suitcase.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still here! It's been a thousand years but I promise this work isn't abandoned, just doing a turtle thing. Brenda/Sharon forever, &c.

Sharon seemed calmer, after their outing, but the calm was a front; once they were inside, Sharon stalked into the kitchen, swiped a bottle of her wine from the counter, and disappeared upstairs without a word.

Well then.

For a moment, Brenda debated going after her, but dismissed the idea just as quickly. If Sharon wanted to be alone, then Brenda would leave her alone. At least this way Sharon wouldn’t huff and puff and judge her, eyes piercing and hands on her hips, while Brenda watched one trashy reality show after the other. She had started with crime, but it was all laughably unrealistic and got too depressing too fast. Everything she saw and heard and felt reminded her of Fritz and what had happened, but some things reminded her a little less, so trashy reality it was. Today, manic people were cooking with ingredients that looked like they might still be alive. After some time spent watching them beat and fold and drown things in oil, Brenda frowned and got up to get a piece of cake. She turned on lamps as she went; twilight had happened while she’d been lying there, swallowed up by the couch and the drama of manufactured deadlines, and the whole floor was saturated in dimness. She paused at the foot of the stairs, straining for any sign of Sharon sobbing or screaming or throwing furniture overhead, but there was nothing. Dead silence, as though Brenda were the only person there. 

Three hours later, she finally began to worry, and it made her grumble. Worrying about people was not in her nature and it was irritating that she now found herself worrying about Sharon, who she didn’t even like. Still, the thought had lodged in her brain, and it wouldn’t go away until she acted. So she made up a small plate of hummus and crackers – that was something healthy people ate, right? – and crept up the stairs to knock softly on Sharon’s closed bedroom door.

No answer, so she knocked again, louder. She heard Sharon say something muffled and annoyed and chose to interpret it as, ‘Come in.’

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find, but it wasn’t Sharon sitting in the armchair by the window, legs crossed on the sill as she stared into the dark, the bed behind her covered head to foot in clothes. ‘Sharon?’ Brenda ventured, taking a cautious step into the room. ‘You doin’ okay up here?’

Sharon turned her head and gave Brenda a wan smile. ‘Oh, I’m just fine,’ she said. ‘How are you, Brenda… Brenda Leigh Johnson? You were smart not to change your name. I changed my name.’ She waved her mostly-empty wineglass in a circle. ‘I was Mrs Flynn. And if I go back from Mrs Flynn I’ll be… Mrs Raydor.’

‘You could always take your maiden name back again,’ Brenda said. ‘And technically you’d be “Ms” Raydor, not Mrs.’

‘Mzzzzzz,’ Sharon said. And snorted.

Okay, so she’d had a bit to drink. Brenda took a step into the room. ‘I brought you a snack,’ she said. ‘If you’re hungry.’

‘Oh!’ Sharon said. She squinted. ‘Why?’

Brenda shifted her weight, as unfamiliar and uncomfortable in the role of caretaker as she’d ever been, and settled on brusque. ‘Because you haven’t eaten in hours, that’s why.’

Sharon made a face but took the plate Brenda handed her and nibbled half-heartedly at a cracker. Brenda gazed out the window at the dark sky – her body, and Sharon’s, were smudged and distorted in the glass, blended together at the edges. She looked at the bed instead, at the mountain of clothes. ‘Whatcha been up to?’

‘Hmm?’ Sharon was still nibbling, but she looked over at Brenda again. ‘Oh. I wanted to… everything reminds me of Andy. I wanted to find something that… that wasn’t…’ she sighed. ‘I’m so tired.’

Brenda briefly considered offering to help her clear the bed, but she was tired, too. It was 11pm, and she’d been going to bed at 9pm, most nights, sleeping long hours late into the morning. Before she could think much about it, she heard herself say, ‘Sleep in my bed.’

Sharon glanced up at her with a funny expression on her face, and Brenda hurried to say, ‘I’ll sleep on the sofa.’

‘Sofa,’ Sharon echoed.

‘Yep,’ Brenda said. ‘I’m shorter than you, it’ll be fine. I’m gonna get you some water and then you go have a shower, ‘kay?’ She had reverted to the voice she used to use for difficult clients at the DA’s office, ripe with placidity and a patience she rarely felt. Her concern for Sharon was real, though; she had never seen her have more than a single glass of wine with dinner, even when their interminable double dates had involved three-course meals and a cheese platter.

Sharon said nothing, but she let Brenda gently remove the empty bottle from the table, the near-empty glass from her hand. She set them on the floor just outside Sharon’s door and then walked down the hall to her own room, where she kicked her dirty clothes under the bed, straightened the comforter, and slid her reading glasses into the open v of her shirt. She filled a glass with water and returned to find that Sharon had eaten a few more crackers before pushing the plate aside.

‘Here,’ Brenda said, thrusting the glass at her. Sharon took it without seeming to notice. 

She’d given her water. What was she meant to do now? ‘I’ll just get my jammies on,’ she said, finally, after the silence began to constrict the room. ‘Then you can go to sleep.’

Sharon managed a smile, vacant but somehow honest. ‘Okay,’ she said.

Brenda waited for the thank you that should have followed, but it never came. ‘You’re welcome,’ she muttered, and walked out in a huff. Sharon probably didn’t even notice.

*

The couch was surprisingly comfortable, longer and wider than Brenda was and sitting in an intersection of moonlight and shadow that made the living room seem less lonely. It took her a while to fall asleep – she was lost in a vicious circle of imagining what Andy and Fritz might have done on this couch, all those times they’d told Brenda and Sharon that they were away on “business”, and then trying not to imagine it and then imagining it harder – but she did so eventually with the aid of a half-bottle of Merlot and a block of dark Kit-Kat she’d swiped from the house.

Fritz always used to tell her off for eating sweets at night. “You’ll be up until morning with your blood sugar levels that high,” he always said, never taking much interest in the fact that chocolate had been Brenda’s go-to sleep aid since she was sixteen and stressed about high school finals. She’d started squirreling her chocolate away in cupboards and drawers so she wouldn’t have to listen to a lecture any time she indulged. Ding Dongs in her underwear drawer, Lindt balls in a box behind the boots she hadn’t worn since she left D.C. He’d never noticed.

The words “house” and “home” were funny things, Brenda thought. It was a stretch to use them interchangeably. She had lived in the duplex with Fritz for seven years (as long as Fritz had been sleeping with Andy, her mind supplied), but she had never really thought of the house as home. Home had been the sprawling five-bedroom she’d grown up in in Atlanta, and then, however briefly, the place she’d lived with her first husband. By the time he was done with his smear campaign on her reputation, any sorrow she’d felt at leaving Atlanta had been overshadowed by desperation to get away from him; one of her few remaining friends had got her a job with the DCPD, and she’d packed a suitcase, abandoned her furniture, and high-tailed it outta there as fast as she could. A little too much of Brenda Leigh being Brenda Leigh and she’d been politely but firmly shunted off to the DA’s office, allowed to keep her house but not her job. There, she’d met Fritz, and Fritz had wooed her into his bed, and then into a new apartment, and then into matrimony, and then into California at his side. His good friend Andy had swung him an interview for FBI liaison to the LAPD; Brenda would have no problem transferring to the DA’s office; there was opportunity for advancement for both of them. So she’d agreed. She loved DC, but she could hardly tell Fritz not to take the job, could she? He was already making noise about having kids, so she needed to let him have this one. The move and the new job might take his mind off it.

She’d been so relieved when he’d stopped pressing the pregnancy issue. Now, of course, she knew it hadn’t been a concession made for her sake – it was all Andy. Fritz had switched coasts because of Andy; he’d let go of the idea of kids because of Andy; he’d bought this house because of Andy.

The house that was now the only place Brenda had to live. The house Brenda decided, right then, that she would negotiate her little socks off to keep in the divorce. She fell asleep with the sharp tang of anticipated vengeance in her mouth, and for the first time since The Announcement, she didn’t cry.

*

She and Sharon were diametrically opposed, less yin and yang than acid and chlorine, and as Brenda’s devastation at the breakup levelled out into something more tempered, Sharon’s seemed to grow and evolve and settle over her body like a second skin. Brenda didn’t know what to do, so she did nothing.

They never talked about the night Sharon had borrowed Brenda’s bed. Brenda had gone up the next morning (late morning) to find it newly made, the sheets changed and lavender-fresh like Sharon’s washing powder. When she peeked through the sliver of open door into Sharon’s own room, she saw that the mountain of clothing on the bed had vanished, the comforter smooth and spotless, as though Brenda had imagined it all.

Over the next few days, Sharon cleaned everything in sight, cooked enough food to feed them for the next three months, and pretended she was fine. She hardly said a word, and every time Brenda looked at her, her mouth was drawn into a tight, thin line, her chin and eyes hard. Even Brenda, self-absorbed and disinterested at the best of times, could tell that she was not fine.

Finally, after four days of watching Sharon scrub mugs and pans and the undersides of unused appliances to within an inch of their lives, Brenda stood in the middle of the kitchen with her hands on her hips and stared Sharon down. Sharon would appreciate the irony.

It only took her a minute to notice, and when she did, she unfolded her body from its frankly improbable position bent behind the oven and sighed. ‘Yes, Brenda? What can I do for you?’

‘It’s time to stop with that.’

Sharon gestured an indignant pink-gloved hand at her soapy bucket. ‘I’ve only just started!’

‘I mean the cleaning,’ Brenda said. ‘You’ve cleaned every inch of this darned place twice over and it…’ She’d intended to say, “It doesn’t look any different,” but that wasn’t true. ‘It looks great,’ she amended. ‘Brand spankin’ new, but it’s time to stop.’ There was a steel in her voice she hadn’t much had to use since she’d “retired”, and hearing it again felt a little like pulling on her favourite sweater after a long day.

The voice worked. Sharon straightened all the way up, threw her scrubbing brush into the bucket, and arched her back in a stretch that cracked. Then she asked, ‘What’s your counteroffer?’

Brenda blinked. ‘Huh?’

‘If you aren’t going to let me keep cleaning, what can I do instead? If I spend another hour reading on the terrace I’m going to go insane.’

‘Maybe we should go to Trader Joe’s, since you used up all our food in that stew.’

It was true; they had each brought an independent armload of groceries when they’d first arrived, which low appetite and lethargy had stretched to two weeks, but they were running on the bare minimum of butter and eggs and almond milk, and the bread was stale and looking a little green.

‘Hmm,’ Sharon said. She squinted at Brenda through her glasses, eyes suspicious. ‘You want to go shopping? Together?’

‘Makes sense, doesn’t it? We’re livin’ here together and I dunno what you like.’ Brenda snorted. ‘Besides hummus and kale.’

‘Yes, and I don’t know what you like besides ice cream and _chocolate cake_ ,’ Sharon said tartly. She seemed to weigh her options for a moment, then shucked off the gloves and tossed them into the sink. ‘Fine. Give me ten minutes.’

They drove and shopped together but paid separately, and Brenda was happy to keep it that way. She didn’t want financial responsibility for Sharon’s weird silken tofu any more than Sharon wanted to fund Brenda’s sugar habit. Brenda bought the milk, Sharon bought the butter, and they each bought a loaf of bread (Sharon’s had caraway seeds in it and Brenda’s most definitely did not) and called it even. They were just loading their bags into opposite sides of the trunk when someone rolled a cart to a sudden stop behind them and said, ‘Sharon? Sharon Flynn, is that you?’

Brenda and Sharon had been engaging in some lukewarm bickering about the merits of a diet low in sugar (none, in Brenda’s opinion), but now, the line around Sharon’s mouth that had softened during their outing returned, sharper than before. Brenda caught her eye in a brief, useless moment of solidarity before Sharon turned, plastered on a fake smile worthy of Brenda herself, and said, ‘Hello, Charity. We were just off.’

‘Why hello there, Charity,’ Brenda said pointedly.

‘Yes, hello, Brenda.’ Charity gave her a weak smile and turned her attention back to Sharon. ‘Just stay a minute and chat, won’t you, I haven’t seen you in forever!’ Charity seemed oblivious to both the look Sharon was giving her and the discomfort she was radiating as she gave it. ‘Andy was at the unit barbeque just the other night, but he said you weren’t feeling well, and I was just _so_ sorry to hear that and—’

‘Just one moment,’ Brenda interjected sweetly, and Charity looked at her as though she hadn’t been standing there the whole time, speaking to her just moments earlier. ‘You mean Andy told everyone that Sharon wasn’t well? And that’s why she wasn’t at the party?’

‘It was a barbeque’ – as though that mattered – ‘but yes. Fritz mentioned you were both down with it.’

‘With what?’ Sharon asked. Brenda could have sworn her jaw clicked as she said it.

‘That awful flu that’s been going around! I trust it’s all better now, if you’re out and about again?’ She glanced between them, seemed to register only then that there was something wrong with the picture. ‘Oh, and you’re shopping together, how… I didn’t realise you two socialised outside of LEO parties!’

‘Oh no, Sharon and I have always been great friends,’ Brenda said. She slammed the trunk door closed as loudly as she could and said, ‘We really need to be going, so nice to see you, bye bye now.’

Brenda was nudging Sharon in the general direction of the passenger door when Sharon stopped and said, ‘We’ve only just started spending time together, actually. It was a fairly natural consequence of our husbands announcing their engagement to each other.’

‘Sharon,’ Brenda murmured. ‘Honey, come on.’

Charity was speechless, gaping as much as her plastic surgery would allow.

‘As you can see, Brenda and I are both perfectly healthy, and we only missed the barbeque because Andy and Fritz didn’t invite us. They left us because they’re lovers, Charity. Gay lovers. You should probably tell as many people as possible.’

In a motion still encoded into Brenda’s muscles at the deepest instinctual level, she opened the car door, ducked Sharon into it by the shoulders, closed it behind her, and then drove away as fast as possible. As she pulled out of the parking lot, she could still see Charity standing there, watching them as they fled.

‘Oh my God,’ Sharon kept saying. She wasn’t rocking back and forth, but it was a near thing. ‘Oh my God, what did I just do, oh my God. Why didn’t you stop me? No,’ she said, before Brenda could snap back something indignant, ‘that wasn’t fair. Oh my God.’

‘It was always gonna come out, Sharon. If you’ll pardon my pun.’

‘I most certainly will not.’ Sharon buried her head in her hands, her long, silky, voluminous hair spilling over them as she fell forward and groaned. ‘I can’t believe I did that. I just outed our husbands to Charity Pope.’

‘Give yourself a break,’ Brenda said. On impulse, she switched lanes to take the next right – there was a liquor store up ahead, and ll the Merlot in France wasn’t enough to combat this day. ‘They’d already left us. Sealed the deal. People were gonna find out sooner or later, and it ain’t like they told us to keep it a secret. So you mighta sped things along a little, but frankly, if they weren’t ready to deal with the fallout of their decision, then they shouldn’ta made it.’ She pulled into the small lot behind the liquor store and unsnapped her seatbelt. ‘Be back in two shakes, you wait here.’

She picked up tequila, Cointreau, lime juice, and then, on a whim, a bottle of gin – she had a vague memory of Sharon drinking a gin and tonic at one of those awful parties. When the sales assistant rang up her purchases and she handed over her card, she found herself wishing, for the first time in her life, that she hadn’t insisted on keeping her finances separate from Fritz’s. She’d have loved using his money for this.

Sharon was quiet on the way home. She rolled down the window and let the noise of afternoon traffic flood in, let the breeze toss her hair into uncharacteristic tangles, and didn’t even snark about Brenda’s navigation skills. When they had returned to the house and unloaded the groceries, Brenda tossed the gin and two plastic cups into her handbag. ‘Change out of those ridiculous shoes,’ she ordered. ‘We’re goin’ to the beach.’

‘Oh, _are_ we?’ Sharon muttered, but she did as she was told, and they trudged a silent, sandy path across the dunes and down to the shore. There was a spot Brenda liked, away from the children with buckets and spades and unpleasant vocal registers, that caught the warmth of the dying light without the glare. She’d come out here, sometimes, when the LEO parties got too much and Fritz was too busy schmoozing to notice her absence. She was surprised that she wasn’t regretting revealing it to Sharon when Sharon spoke. ‘I used to come out here, sometimes. When I wasn’t playing hostess.’

‘Huh,’ Brenda said.

‘What?’

She felt Sharon turn to look at her, but didn’t take her eyes off the water. Sharon’s eyes were sometimes too much for her – too deep, too intense or unblinking – and she didn’t feel up to facing them right now. Things were almost comfortable, and she wanted to keep them that way. ‘Nothin’,’ she said. She pulled her own shoes off and dug her toes into the sand, deep enough that all the red polish was covered in tiny grains like a healed-over wound. ‘I used to come here, too.’

‘Oh,’ Sharon echoed. ‘I wonder that we never met out here.’

‘No you don’t,’ Brenda scoffed. ‘You were always where I wasn’t and vice-versa. Never woulda happened.’

To her surprise, instead of grumbling, Sharon chuckled. ‘No, I suppose not.’ She paused, and Brenda took the silence as invitation to pour her half a plastic cup of gin. ‘Prost.’

‘Prost.’ Brenda knocked her cup against Sharon’s and missed the clink that didn’t come. They drank. A flock of seagulls swooped over the ocean. Maybe they were in search of something; maybe they were just going home.

Her cup was almost empty when Sharon said, ‘We seem to be doing an admirable job of not killing each other despite our proximity.’

‘”Seem” to be?’

‘You know what I mean,’ Sharon snapped.

Brenda laughed, nearly. ‘Who’d’ve thought? If someone had told me I’d be housemates with you I’d have sent ‘em off for a psych test.’

‘As would I,’ Sharon said drily. ‘At least we’re just housemates. Can you imagine if we were sharing a room?’

‘Oh, Lord,’ Brenda said. She faked a full-body shutter. ‘The horror.’

Sharon rolled her eyes, but held out her cup for a refill, which Brenda begrudgingly allowed. ‘Your bed was comfortable, though.’

Brenda blinked, caught off guard; she had honestly never expected Sharon to speak of it. She’d started to wonder if it had even happened. ‘Is…’ she swallowed; the gin was making her mouth dry. ‘Is yours not? Comfortable, I mean?’

‘It’s all right,’ Sharon said. ‘A little hard, perhaps, but I can cope.’

‘Is it hurting you?’

Sharon frowned. ‘No.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ Brenda heaved a great internal sigh at the thing inside her she had learned to recognise as her conscience, and gave in. ‘We can switch, Sharon. If your mattress is causing you pain.’

Sharon was quiet for a long time, her face hidden in her cup. Then she sighed and said, quietly, ‘Why would you offer that? You wanted that room.’

Brenda shrugged. ‘I know. But I don’t want it more than I wanna stop you from whining about your back pain.’

‘Oh, _I_ see. This is an entirely selfish act.’

‘Exactly,’ Brenda said. ‘In character and everything. No need to worry.’

‘Well, good,’ Sharon said. She cocked her head to the side, hair falling in front of her glasses, and smiled a small smile. ‘I won’t worry.’

Brenda’s stomach did a weird little flip-flop and she looked away, back at the water. She must have had too much gin.


End file.
